One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings - Hardcover

Burgess, Anthony; Forkner, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078670568X ISBN 13: 9780786705689

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1998

Synopsis

In a collection of nonfiction writings, the British novelist addresses his childhood, his experiences in Malaysia and Monaco, his own work and its critics, and the work of his contemporaries

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

While this posthumous collection of essays, articles, and occasional pieces from the last two decades of Burgesss life hardly ranks with his more signal works such as Byrne, (1997), and Clockwork Orange, (1962), its erudition, deftness, and polymathic range make it an exceptionally good read. Though he was one of the last, great expatriate British writers, Burgess never quite found his audience. His reputation as a novelist has whipsawed wildly and is still far from secure (there are strong partisans on both sides of the issue), but few dispute his acuity and fine-honed judgments as a literary critic. In this collection, certainly, it is where he is at his very best. His pieces on Joyce, Waugh, Flann OBrien, and more are without exception full of fresh insights and provocative elucidations. Still, he is almost as good when he ranges farther and farther afield. From composers to architects such as Gaudi to movie stars to cultural differences, great cities, and any number of other subjects, his sheer, informed range and the breadth and play of his ideas are truly daunting. Burgess disciplined himself to write 1,000 words a day, and given that kind of productivity and the momentary nature, frankly acknowledged by Burgess, of these pieces, the occasional misfire is excusable. His pieces on his boyhood in Manchester are particularly weak. There are also a number or repetitions and recyclings, particularly his musings on the life of the novelist and the differences between the French and the English (one intellectiona second-hand one at thaton the saving stupidity of the Brits, appears at least five times). Though the whiff of Grub Street wafts across many of these pages, they are far more thought-provoking, polished, and richly readable than the usual harried, written-for-money pieces most writers crank out. We can only hope that this is not the last of Burgesss literary remains. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist and critic Burgess was a polymath, a man with immense stores of erudition on history, music, art, religion, philosophy?whatever caught his fancy and lodged in his very capacious mind. He also had a good journalist's knack of being able to write to order, swiftly and interestingly, on a multitude of topics. So in this collection of occasional pieces published in the last two decades of his life, he ruminates on subjects as various as Margaret Thatcher, Yeats, Ravel, Sir Walter Scott, his own Clockwork Orange (which came to haunt him, as did the celebrated movie version that was derived, he says, from the inferior American edition that lacked his own final chapter), his youth in Manchester, the British royal family and the temperament of the French. Many of these pieces may have been written in haste, but they do not show it: Burgess is always alert, well informed and infinitely readable. One of the themes running through the collection is his regret at having to spend so much time and effort at the sort of writing that pays the bills rather than at his preferred fiction. Much to his amused disgust, he came to be regarded more as a critic than as a novelist?though he was no mean practitioner of either art.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 078670568X
• ISBN 13: 9780786705689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 380